Alice Mason Artist

What are ‘cases’? What are ‘ infections ‘? Are we being controlled through language? Loaded ambiguous words? Semantics? Are cases illnesses? Are they symptomatic? Asymptomatic? Mild? Severe? Hospitalisations? PCR tests are highly unreliable, showing constant false positives and showing positive for the minutest fragment of virus that we have come into contact with in our pasts. We contain thousands of viruses. It has always been thus.
The Junta of Andalucia has announced it wants people to wear masks inside their own homes. This is on mainstream media and was on Canal Sur..
Students on lockdowns for possibly months within university campuses in northern England because.of ‘ cases’. . The hospitality and music industries all but destroyed. Young people’s education disrupted. Jobs, millions of jobs, gone. Mental health issues through the roof. Suicide way up. Cancer treatment, breast- screening, gone, postponed. The NHS hugely minimised. Because of ‘ cases’. The meaning never clarified. No one wants to ‘kill granny’.
We are being manipulated into thinking it is something right- wing to question the lockdown policies. This is abhorrent to left-leaning people as they ( I being one) would be appalled to think they could be considered right-wing. People questioning narratives or calling out fascism being called conspiracy theorists. I despise Trump. Doesn’t mean I agree with the destruction of livelihoods and children’s and young people’s mental health. Children being treated as though they are weapons of mass destruction. Deprivation of social contact. Sinister, illogical and unclear at best. Is vaccination the new disaster capitalism? Why is Bill Gates the new second coming? The darling of the left? What has happened to the left? Where is the nuance? Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance. Where is the dissent? Where are the questions? Why did we all speak out against the Iraq war, but no questioning of the policies surrounding a nebulous and shadowy virus which has a 99.6 per cent survival rate? Yes it was bad in the spring. Yes it killed many people. It has weakened…it has become fetishised and hyper-focussed, an obsession of a thing. Endless, constant, grinding, wearing. There is no opposition, so people demonstrate in Trafalgar Square and again are called right-wing . Absolutely rubbish. Some people I know have gone on the demos are anything but QAnon conspiracy theorists, but feel alienated and feeling powerless, join forces with people of other persuasions as they have no voice and no one is speaking for them, at least not intelligently. Little wonder they believe in the wilder narratives because MSM is worse. And they have no jobs, and everything they hold dear is being denied them. Old people unvisited in nursing homes, dying alone. People being denied doctor’s appointments. I could go on and on.
Heaven forbid we should commit the cardinal sin of questioning or transgressing our own previously held beliefs and political allegiances. It is dividing us. Society is disintegrating. Because of something that is not killing anyone directly anymore. But the collateral damage is. I don’t believe the stats and I don’t believe anything much. There is no one making any sense. At all. Whatever happened to the policy of ” flattening the curve? ” But now we have to endure restrictions ad infinitum with no apparent end in sight. Until when? The Holy Grail appears in the form of rushed vaccine upon which billions will be made… ? The ‘ vaccine ‘ I fear, is the new economic reset. And after which, perhaps miraculously the virus will ‘disappear’ and will no longer be reported on.
I can’t do this anymore. I can only do what I can do, which is be there for my family and try to find strength in my art practice and the sanity I know exists within my friends and allies in this unknowing and ever more polarised world. It’s all just a smokescreen now.
NB. Other viruses are available and will no doubt contribute to the endless barrage of reports of ambiguous cases. Nothing is clear. I have been listening for months to virologists, historians of pandemics and immunologists who have been left out of mainstream media.

The Machine Stops by EM Forster – outlines a world where people live in isolation, never moving, fearing the merest touch from another human, and where a machine totally dominates and oversees their existence. Prescient.